[sdiy] Chris Franke's modular

[Richard Wentk]

At 18:05 25/03/2005, DWa2898572 at aol.com wrote:
>I've been a TD fan since 1971, and looking at CF's Synth brought back some 
>really good memories, especially seeing them at Avery Fisher Hall on the 
>first US tour, 4/5/77 was the date, a reference for you young's! I taped 
>the show, and traded it to fans all over the world!

It's not that modular. So far as I know CF sold the original 70s era 
modular - extended with some PPG and Project Elektronic modules - in the 
mid 80s. I think it ended up with Hans Zimmer, who used it on the Video 
Killed the Radio Star sessions and subsequently expanded it further into 
the Moog Wall of Doom.

http://www.synthfool.com/zimmoog.html

which I believe Kevin may also have had something to do with. :)

I actually did some work on the Zimmer modular back in 1988, when it was 
(literally) off the wall and in pieces. The story is the original keyboard 
tech who was working on it killed himself (!) so Zimmer got someone called 
Roy Gwyn, who was a tech for Ultravox and Warren Cann, to sort it out. At 
some point I was drafted in to help, although to be honest I didn't do much 
more than cleaning, wiring and testing. Roy did the majority of the work on 
it, including adding some interesting mods - which unfortunately I can't 
remember in detail - to help keep the 901s in tune.

The current CF modular seems to be a rather stylised recreation of what he 
had with TD, built not long after he went solo. My impression was there was 
a period when CF was lacking a modular at all, and this was built to remedy 
that.

Richard